The Moorchild by Eloise McGraw Page A

then she was gone. Short of tying her to the doorpost, they could no longer keep her off the moor.
    “Let her be, Daughter,” Old Bess counseled, stopping by the cottage one day to find Anwara in frustrated tears. “I have told you. She will come to no harm on the moor.”
    “She should do as she’s bid!” cried Anwara.
    “She does so—in everything but this.” Old Bess watchedas Anwara dashed a hand across her eyes and angrily blew her nose. “It is the moor itself you fear, is it not?” When Anwara did not answer, she took off her shawl, laid her little gift of sweet cicely on the table, and said coaxingly, “Come, brew us a cup and sit awhile, and calm yourself. Saaski will come back. But she cannot help going, and you’d best make your peace with it.”
    Anwara’s shoulders drooped, and she did not answer, only pushed the kettle over the fire on its iron arm, and crumbled dried mint into a pot. They did not mention the matter again.
    However, after that day she did not forbid Saaski to go where she would, or complain to Yanno. Yanno was glad to let the subject drop, to turn his mind back to his smithing, which he knew something about, and tell himself the two of them must have worked it out somehow.
    It was a vast relief for Saaski. Her life had already begun to be two lives—the humdrum one in the village, made irksome by the bedevilment of the other children, though brightened by Old Bess and the books—and the other, truant life, high among the mists and bogs and wild, stony reaches of the moor. She was never sure which part of the moor she liked best—the steep broom-gilded, heather-shadowed slopes always solid underfoot, or the sometimes steeper bogs, spiced with danger. After a dry spell a bog was merely a mat of thready, springy moss that you could bound across as if your feet had sprouted little wings. In wet weather—which was scarier but exciting—you had to pick your way across a bog, wary of the tall tussocks of sedge and cotton grass that marked the wettest spots, where a misstepcould set you sinking and struggling into the sucking depths. But the glimmering little tracks she often saw there always traced a safe pathway—though she was careful never to put a foot directly on that glimmer.
    The tracks crisscrossed the dry moor, too. Now and then she fancied she saw something—or someone—scurrying along them, too small to be a man, too moor-skilled to be a lost child, a shape moving too erratically to focus on. But if she managed a closer look, it always turned out to be a moorhen after all, or the flitting shadow of a raven wheeling overhead—or nothing but fancy.
    She had soon found Tam and the goats again, by climbing as high as she could and listening for the mellow, fluttering sound of shepherd’s pipes and the tinkle of Divil’s bell.
    “So! You’ve come back at last!” Tam exclaimed the day she first showed herself—a bit hesitantly—around the shoulder of the big rock he was leaning against. “I reckoned you’d changed your mind and didn’t like us after all.” His eyes widened as she stepped into full view. “What’s that you’ve got? It’s never bagpipes! Can you play ’em?”
    “I can,” Saaski told him, grinning at his surprise and tucking the bag under her arm. “Will we play together?”
    “We will! But this reed’s got too soft a voice—I’d best use me wee screamer.” Tam tucked away his long reed pipe and got out the small one hollowed from a finger-thick twig. “So give us a tune! I’ll find if I can tootle along o’ you.”
    Saaski huffed and puffed the bag full, turning hot-faced with the effort, gave it the little clout with her fist that produced its preliminary coughing wail, then launched intoone of the liveliest of her strange little tunes. Tam listened a moment, his mouth ajar, once lifted his little pipe to his lips but then lowered it again and sat bemused till she’d finished.
    “I’ll never learn that’n just tootlin’